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| Me and my partner taking 5th at Nationals for synchronized trampoline |
Gymnastics is a unique sport. It's highly individual, yet they force a team aspect out of it. It's incredibly repetitious yet constantly asks you to take huge risks. It's physically brutal yet the mental aspect can cost you more than a failed joint. It's full of contradictions, snap judgments, and double standards. Coaches, gymnasts, and judges can play extremely dirty and the stories about children being put through what many might consider a form of torture are rampant (and often not unfounded). Countless kids have had genuine breakdowns by the age of 12 under the pressure of competition, leaving the sport for good, cursing the lasting emotional torment it's left in their lives.
And yet, for 11 years I absolutely loved it and was engrossed in the life. I didn't leave because of an injury, a mental breakdown, or even because of the time I got screwed out of medalling in my first Nationals. I left because I somehow lost the favor of my coach--he began taking his personal problems out on me and over the course of 6 months or so I began to seriously question whether or not I was prepared to make the personal sacrifices necessary to get to that next level. Because that next level was to move into that world of the Elite gymnast--where home schooling is the norm to work around 8 hour a day practices, compete not just around the state and country, but around the world, and compete against girls who could sometimes be 6-8 years older than me with the same extra years experience in competitions.
To this day, I often wonder if things would have worked out differently had my coach not found a new "favorite" on the team. Would I have questioned how much farther I could realistically go? Would I have started wondering what a "normal" life would be like? Would I have lost my passion and dedication? Would I have to wait for that career ending injury and following surgeries to make my decision for me? I'll never know, but these questions still linger. Unfinished business. Possible life altering mistakes that I have lived with for almost 20 years. No, the questions don't fade with time.
I do know that I put all my medals and ribbons in a shoe box and didn't look at them for a couple years. They're still in that same shoe box today. I took down all my posters of other gymnasts I idolized. I put every reference to the sport out of my room, and I refused to watch it on TV for a while. The decision to leave tore me up inside, the way very few things in life can do. I defined myself as a gymnast and now suddenly had to start from scratch on figuring out who I was as an individual. I was 14 years old and didn't know what it was like to not immediately go to the gym almost every day after school. I had only a handful of friends who weren't gymnasts. I had very little to relate to my peers with because I was behind on movies, music, cute boys, and even the cool stuff to wear because all of my focus was dedicated to gymnastics or getting good enough grades so I could keep doing gymnastics.
The kind of gymnastics I flourished in wasn't your traditional all around with beam, bars, vault and floor. Although that's where I started at the age of 3 in a program called Kinder-lites with my first coach Mrs. B. My parents were looking for an outlet for my energy--and I found sanctuary. We moved three years later and found a local gym--the head coach had been a former assistant to Bella Karolyi. I was star struck--a real link to Mary Lou? How could I not be? I still remember try outs to make the competitive team at 6 years old. I made it--and the prize was my very own "belt" with my name in purple, the color of the mighty Titans to which I now belonged. I cherished it and wore it proudly EVERYWHERE. I remember various coaches--Cheryl, Ed, Kelly, and Raymond, the team head coach. One of them was not so nice in their coaching style and made some of those torture rumors ring a little bit too true. But that coach got results and quickly ruled out the mentally weak--so it's difficult to say it wasn't effective.
I competed, I placed, and I got to a point where I wasn't going to advance anymore in that gym. So, not being too emotionally attached at that point, I left for a year and started playing soccer. Turns out I wasn't very good at it. I didn't have the natural ability like I did in gymnastics. So fate intervened a little--I attended a soccer friend's birthday party at a gymnastics center. But this was something called Power Tumbling and sanctioned through the ATTA (American Trampoline and Tumbling Association--and now seems to have become a part of the USGA). Instead of a square floor, there was a bouncy strip you tumbled all the way down--no dance moves. Instead of bars and beam, there was a trampoline you did a routine one instead of tested new tricks. The coaches hosting the party were coaxing me to do some of my old tricks and I was like a duck in water. They asked me to join their team that day. How could I refuse? I was reinvigorated. I was a mediocre soccer player at best, and I knew I had the chance to be truly great at this.
In the span of two competition seasons, I managed to move from Novice to Advanced. I was having fun. I had learned more new tricks in two years than I had in 6 years of all around. This was where I belonged. My mom diligently took me to fabulous destinations like Lawton, OK for meets. And then, in 1992, I qualified for my first Nationals. There I lived a gymnast's worst nightmare. I fell on my face in my first event, killing any hopes of being on the podium. But I still had two more events to go and I had to pull it together for those. I pulled off my routines, but they weren't good enough to medal... or so I thought.
When I went to check my posted scores to see how I did, my mom noticed the math didn't look right on one of my events. She pulled out a calculator to double check, and yes, they had shorted me two full points and the correct score would have put me in 2nd place and qualified me to go to the World Competition in that event. She went to the judges, argued, was denied, argued some more, found the people running the event, argued with them--and all of her effort went in vain. The math error cost me a medal at my first Nationals and a chance to compete representing Team USA. I was devastated, angry, and determined to not let it happen again. I felt cheated--so much more so than I ever did in all around where they would deduct points if your hair got out of place during your floor routine. Because some idiots couldn't double check their math, I missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime. It was my equivalent of an Olympics and I'd been robbed. Now I'd have to wait two years for a chance to make Worlds again.
1993 led me back to Nationals and my first international stage, the Indo Pacific Games. But that's also the season where it fell apart. My coach at the time, Chad, started having relationship problems with his girlfriend, pretty serious financial issues (the gym even closed a couple years later), and came to practice frequently taking his frustrations out on the team. My teammates were no longer my best friends thanks to various changing social structures from joining the world of teen angst and what I can only assume self preservation to stay out of Chad's cross hairs. If the negative focus was on me, then it wasn't on them. From all sides, I was an outsider trying to claw my way back in while trying to maintain my focus on my events and routines. It was exhausting. I cried after going to bed many nights--I didn't want anyone to see or hear me. I started dreading going to practice because I knew I'd get yelled at, ignored, or even ridiculed sometimes outright, with the coach joining in.
Somehow I managed to fight through it to end up finishing 5th in one event and 9th in another in Nationals--and 7th overall in one event in the Games. I was, by definition, one of the top gymnasts in the country, part of Team USA, and the thought of going through all that another year made me physically sick. Surprising both of my parents, I told them during the off season I wanted out. They asked me to think about it, asked if I wanted to find a new gym, but I told them I had been miserable for months and that I didn't love it anymore.
Reluctantly, they helped me cut all ties with Chad, the gym, and they put up with my senseless drama about not knowing what to be for a while. My mom convinced me to go through the certification to become a judge--I had to have been one of the youngest judges ever, but they allowed it because of my years of experience. I hated it. If I wasn't out there competing, it just felt wrong to be there at all. Plus, seeing how subjective other judges were and how open they were about it only made me more angry about my years of being on the other side, wondering if I was being purposefully kept off the podium.
So what did I get to take away from all this once it was all said and done? I avoided any massive, life altering injuries, which I still consider myself lucky for--it was very common to compete hurt and nothing I ever did turned into something serious. I came away with one of the biggest competitive drives that still influences me greatly today. I have a "never quit" attitude--which has helped me push through some tough times and made me better, but I've also stayed a part of things far too long, thinking I'm obligated to finish it simply because I started it. I have yet to be put in a situation that I've felt was more stressful than competing on the world stage--so I'm either in massive denial or I handle stress really well. There's good and bad that carry forward--same for the memories when I look back.
Now I'm starting to get asked if I'll get my daughter into gymnastics. I want to let her try because, honestly, she does show some aptitude for it already. But I'm not sure I want to let her get as involved as I did. The one simple reason is that I still can't answer that fundamental question, "Was it all worth it?"
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